Given the general lack of coordinated efforts to address climate change by US federal and state governments, many US cities are taking it upon themselves to generate their own comprehensive climate protection plans.
When asked what her intentions were for Austin’s latest Climate Equity Plan, local activist and climate plan steering committee member, Kaiba White, identified two ways that she hoped the plan would impact the city. “One of them was to raise more awareness in the community that we have a climate plan and that this process was happening.” According to Kaiba, climate plans are important for enlisting community participation to effect real change. “We are not going to succeed in meeting our goals by city government deciding on something; it will require participation.” Thus, Kaiba and fellow committee members worked to ensure that the plan would provide the public with much needed information about the city’s ongoing and future climate protection policies, programs, and actions and how people can get involved.
Equally important, however, Kaiba also maintained that these plans offer the public a chance to weigh the extent of the city’s efforts against their own expectations and desires. As she put it, “The other thing is that, people may assume we are further ahead than we are.” Here, Kaiba is referencing the fact that Austin has a notable history of strong climate policy and it is often simply assumed to be an environmental leader. As a participant in the climate planning process, Kaiba interpreted this expectation as a personal responsibility: “So, the other priority was that the plan matches what people already think we are doing; that Austin lives up to the reputation as strong on climate; that we will protect our environment.” In this latter sense, what the climate plan offers the public is a discrete locus for critique, should it not live up to their idea of what Austin is and/or should be as an environmental icon.
In other words, it’s not just that climate protection plans or other similar urban plans help to establish goals and coordinate activity; they also betray the City’s priorities and their level of commitment to their purported goals. This fact notwithstanding, like any discursive object, climate plans can be written in such a way as to mislead as much as they inform.
As with many other controversial political arenas, environmental discourses are rife with claims of deceit, distrust, cynicism, and misunderstanding (Mühlhaüser and Peace 2006). The legacy of decades of greenwashing and brownlashing is such that accusations of poorly conducted science and data analysis still abound. Take, for example, the claim that the City of San Diego, California, a beacon of sustainability transitions, had successfully cut their tail-pipe emissions by 25% in the last decade alone. In a recent report on their climate action plan, the city published a climate report update that included the following chart documenting its progress on greenhouse gas reductions across different sectors.
According to the information presented here, one would expect that San Diego was making significant strides in shifting away from a primarily fossil-fueled, single-occupancy vehicle transportation system. However, as attested by Joshua Emerseon Smith of the San Diego Union-Tribune (2020), this is simply not the case. According to Smith, the city has been able to show meager reductions in tail-pipe emissions (4% between 2016-2019), but nothing close to the magnitude claimed in their report. The discrepancy lies in the way San Diego’s emissions baselines were calculated.
Back in December of 2015, when San Diego first adopted its climate plan, the city chose to set 2010 as a baseline year, against which they would track their GHG reduction progress. However, at the time, the city simply did not have adequate data on vehicle miles traveled (VMT) for this particular year. Thus, in lieu of conducting a new traffic analysis, climate protection planners used an old economic and demographic projection produced by San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG) that had estimated what the VMT would be in 2010.
While deferring to a projection may at first seem reasonable, given the circumstances, this particular projection was produced before the economic downturn of 2008, and therefore grossly overestimated the number of cars on the road. It calculated city-wide VMT at 13.7 billion for 2010, against which the 2016 data showed a drop of about one billion. If true, this would be an impressive feat, but these numbers simply do not add up. Such a dramatic drop should coincide with either a huge uptake of public transportation or a significant loss of jobs, neither of which took place during this time. Furthermore, a more recent SANDAG report states that the city’s freeway VMT increased from 6.7 billion to 7.5 billion during the same 2010-2016 time frame (Smith 2020).
In sum, all signs indicate that the 2010 baseline is vastly inflated, a conclusion that even the city itself has admitted, after being called out (Smith 2017). Despite this fact, however, the City of San Diego continues to use this inflated data to publish its climate reports and tout their climate victories, claiming to have reduced a whopping 1.5 million metric tons of carbon emissions from its transportation system between 2010 and 2019. What is more, this highly dubious number amounts to nearly half of the city’s purported total reduction of 3.3 million tons.
When pressed, Ashley Rosia-Tremonti, sustainability manager at the city of San Diego, was quoted as saying, “We’ve been very clear in the reporting that those reductions in the baseline year are … not a result of any specific actions that either the state, our region or the city has taken to reduce (vehicle miles traveled)” (quoted in Smith 2020). That may be so, but it is still extremely misleading to report on such problematic data at all. Furthermore, as of yet, no action has been taken to update the 2010 baseline or correct the discrepancies in the City’s reported emission reductions.
Climate planning marks an important discursive domain, one that mediates the relationship between a city’s popular representation, its legal apparatus, and its materiality. In her study of Ecuador’s resource radicalisms, Riofrancos takes a similar position insisting that much of the political struggle she witnessed took place in and through language. Taking aim at political science, her ethnography denies claims of language’s epiphenomenal status, arguing instead that the materiality of all semiotic artifacts both enable and limit their political efficacy. She concludes, “whether through its performative function or as a medium of political justification and critique, governance, and resistance” the world is shaped by language (Riofrancos 2020, 19). And as such, both climate plans and their surrounding discourses mark important sites for ethnographic inquiry, as they continue to shape the future of life in cities across the US and beyond.
Riofrancos, Thea N. 2020. Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador. Radical Américas. Durham: Duke University Press.
Smith, Joshua Emerson. 2017. "How Real is San Diego's Climate Action Plan's Progress?" San Diego Union-Tribune, November.
Smith, Joshua Emerson. 2020. “San Diego Climate Plan Relies on Inaccurate Data for Tailpipe Emissions from Cars and Trucks.” San Diego Union-Tribune, December.
Cite as
Anonymous, "San Diego continues to tout greenhouse-gas reductions that never happened", contributed by James Adams, The Energy Rights Project, Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography, last modified 13 January 2021, accessed 19 April 2024. https://energyrights.info/content/san-diego-continues-tout-greenhouse-gas-reductions-never-happened
Critical Commentary
Given the general lack of coordinated efforts to address climate change by US federal and state governments, many US cities are taking it upon themselves to generate their own comprehensive climate protection plans.
When asked what her intentions were for Austin’s latest Climate Equity Plan, local activist and climate plan steering committee member, Kaiba White, identified two ways that she hoped the plan would impact the city. “One of them was to raise more awareness in the community that we have a climate plan and that this process was happening.” According to Kaiba, climate plans are important for enlisting community participation to effect real change. “We are not going to succeed in meeting our goals by city government deciding on something; it will require participation.” Thus, Kaiba and fellow committee members worked to ensure that the plan would provide the public with much needed information about the city’s ongoing and future climate protection policies, programs, and actions and how people can get involved.
Equally important, however, Kaiba also maintained that these plans offer the public a chance to weigh the extent of the city’s efforts against their own expectations and desires. As she put it, “The other thing is that, people may assume we are further ahead than we are.” Here, Kaiba is referencing the fact that Austin has a notable history of strong climate policy and it is often simply assumed to be an environmental leader. As a participant in the climate planning process, Kaiba interpreted this expectation as a personal responsibility: “So, the other priority was that the plan matches what people already think we are doing; that Austin lives up to the reputation as strong on climate; that we will protect our environment.” In this latter sense, what the climate plan offers the public is a discrete locus for critique, should it not live up to their idea of what Austin is and/or should be as an environmental icon.
In other words, it’s not just that climate protection plans or other similar urban plans help to establish goals and coordinate activity; they also betray the City’s priorities and their level of commitment to their purported goals. This fact notwithstanding, like any discursive object, climate plans can be written in such a way as to mislead as much as they inform.
As with many other controversial political arenas, environmental discourses are rife with claims of deceit, distrust, cynicism, and misunderstanding (Mühlhaüser and Peace 2006). The legacy of decades of greenwashing and brownlashing is such that accusations of poorly conducted science and data analysis still abound. Take, for example, the claim that the City of San Diego, California, a beacon of sustainability transitions, had successfully cut their tail-pipe emissions by 25% in the last decade alone. In a recent report on their climate action plan, the city published a climate report update that included the following chart documenting its progress on greenhouse gas reductions across different sectors.
According to the information presented here, one would expect that San Diego was making significant strides in shifting away from a primarily fossil-fueled, single-occupancy vehicle transportation system. However, as attested by Joshua Emerseon Smith of the San Diego Union-Tribune (2020), this is simply not the case. According to Smith, the city has been able to show meager reductions in tail-pipe emissions (4% between 2016-2019), but nothing close to the magnitude claimed in their report. The discrepancy lies in the way San Diego’s emissions baselines were calculated.
Back in December of 2015, when San Diego first adopted its climate plan, the city chose to set 2010 as a baseline year, against which they would track their GHG reduction progress. However, at the time, the city simply did not have adequate data on vehicle miles traveled (VMT) for this particular year. Thus, in lieu of conducting a new traffic analysis, climate protection planners used an old economic and demographic projection produced by San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG) that had estimated what the VMT would be in 2010.
While deferring to a projection may at first seem reasonable, given the circumstances, this particular projection was produced before the economic downturn of 2008, and therefore grossly overestimated the number of cars on the road. It calculated city-wide VMT at 13.7 billion for 2010, against which the 2016 data showed a drop of about one billion. If true, this would be an impressive feat, but these numbers simply do not add up. Such a dramatic drop should coincide with either a huge uptake of public transportation or a significant loss of jobs, neither of which took place during this time. Furthermore, a more recent SANDAG report states that the city’s freeway VMT increased from 6.7 billion to 7.5 billion during the same 2010-2016 time frame (Smith 2020).
In sum, all signs indicate that the 2010 baseline is vastly inflated, a conclusion that even the city itself has admitted, after being called out (Smith 2017). Despite this fact, however, the City of San Diego continues to use this inflated data to publish its climate reports and tout their climate victories, claiming to have reduced a whopping 1.5 million metric tons of carbon emissions from its transportation system between 2010 and 2019. What is more, this highly dubious number amounts to nearly half of the city’s purported total reduction of 3.3 million tons.
When pressed, Ashley Rosia-Tremonti, sustainability manager at the city of San Diego, was quoted as saying, “We’ve been very clear in the reporting that those reductions in the baseline year are … not a result of any specific actions that either the state, our region or the city has taken to reduce (vehicle miles traveled)” (quoted in Smith 2020). That may be so, but it is still extremely misleading to report on such problematic data at all. Furthermore, as of yet, no action has been taken to update the 2010 baseline or correct the discrepancies in the City’s reported emission reductions.
Climate planning marks an important discursive domain, one that mediates the relationship between a city’s popular representation, its legal apparatus, and its materiality. In her study of Ecuador’s resource radicalisms, Riofrancos takes a similar position insisting that much of the political struggle she witnessed took place in and through language. Taking aim at political science, her ethnography denies claims of language’s epiphenomenal status, arguing instead that the materiality of all semiotic artifacts both enable and limit their political efficacy. She concludes, “whether through its performative function or as a medium of political justification and critique, governance, and resistance” the world is shaped by language (Riofrancos 2020, 19). And as such, both climate plans and their surrounding discourses mark important sites for ethnographic inquiry, as they continue to shape the future of life in cities across the US and beyond.